The Right Insurance

What insurance do you need if you want to rent a motorhome in Australia or New Zealand? Is the standard motorhome rental insurance sufficient? Do you need the significantly more expensive full-cover version? What is a liability insurance for? And are the classics, travel cancellation and foreign health insurances always necessary? At this point we want to give an overview of the often-complicated subject of insurances.

Please note that the text below is intended to provide general assistance in choosing the right insurance. It does not replace the individual rental conditions of the rental company.

Hardly anyone knows the term if they don't work in the industry themselves. But what is really hiding behind this expression? If the vehicle is damaged, it must be repaired at some point. In the event of damage that does not make the vehicle completely impassable, this can happen after the end of your own rental period. For camper / motorhome rental, however, these are days in which the motorhome cannot be further used. If the damage is heavy, a replacement vehicle may be required and for the moment no further rental will be possible. The revenue gap resulting from this drop out is considered the demurrage cost.

If a customer is only protected by a standard insurance, he has to close this gap by himself. This means that he will continue to pay rent for the days the vehicle is in maintenance and repair, even after the vacation is long over. Demurrage costs are not capped. If it is difficult to repair damage, if spare parts are missing and are only delivered after weeks, then it can add up to a sum that exceeds the actual rent of the camper / motorhome. So, we're talking about amounts that can get the customer in real trouble. For this reason, when traveling by camper / motorhome in New Zealand or Australia, we always recommend a full-cover insurance that covers all these costs.

Damage to these areas, which are susceptible and therefore somewhat rough terrain, occurs frequently and is not covered by a standard insurance. A windshield quickly costs $ 600, a tire at least $ 100 and so on. Therefore, the full-cover insurance pays off quickly. Broken tires and a stone chip in the window are not uncommon on the often-unpaved roads when traveling to Australia or New Zealand.

The liability reduction insurance is a third-party service that is intended to be an alternative to the expensive full-cover rental. Why this, however, no longer makes sense is to be explained here.

A LRI is offered in addition to the standard insurance from insurance companies or by some credit card providers. If a customer causes damage that is covered by the standard insurance, the liability reduction insurance takes effect and covers the cost of the liability. There is no liability for damage that is not covered by standard insurance. In this case, the damage must be paid in full by the customer and liability reduction insurance does not take effect.

Since the rental companies earn a lot more on full-cover rentals, they are very interested in not making them irrelevant by the possibility of a liability reduction insurance. Therefore, the conditions of the standard rent have been continuously adjusted. In the past, the two types of insurances differed mainly in that the standard insurance has a liability, while this was no longer the case in the full-cover insurance. With a liability reduction insurance, you had a cheap solution to avoid the full-cover rental with the same service. To counteract this, more and more services were removed from the standard rental, so that there is now hardly any damage that would be covered here. As a result, there are evenly few liabilities that are covered by liability reduction insurance.

In the end, you pay a daily rate for the liability reduction insurance, while having minimal insurance coverage (in the best case, undercarriage of your own vehicle minus processing fees and demurrage costs) but imagining to be on the safe side... Therefore, we explicitly recommend the full-cover insurance, which is the only option for us to represent carefree travels!

There is no health coverage comparable to New Zealand's ACC in Australia. The injury protection offered by the state is significantly more limited. In addition, benefits vary from state to state. Therefore, as a tourist, one should not count on government aid and include this in considerations for a foreign health insurance.

A liability insurance must be signed for every car and camper / motorhome registered in Australia. For rental vehicles, this has already been processed by the rental company. This insurance is liable if you cause an accident yourself and the opponent is injured. If you are injured even in a self-inflicted accident, the liability insurance of the vehicle does not pay though. Without your own insurance cover, it can get really expensive. In Australia, too, we strongly advise you to pick your own travel insurance.